Many consumers are familiar with online services that permit shopping and purchase of entertainment media items, such as music CDs, books, movie DVDs, and video games. Some services, such as the MSN® Music website hosted by Microsoft Corporation, allow users to download purchased items, such as individual songs.
Many of the popular online services provide a rich and colorful browsing experience for the consumer. Web pages are arranged with thumbnail images depicting the covers of various media items, such as CD covers, front book covers, movie DVD covers, and video game covers. When a user purchases a media item and stores it on her playback device, the corresponding cover image can be obtained and presented to the user anytime the media item is handled by the device (e.g., listed in a playlist or menu, or played back).
In another common scenario, a user purchases physical media and wants to store a copy of the media data on his computer. For example, suppose the user buys a music CD and wants to “rip” the CD to his computer. The digital version of the album art can be fetched using an online database service and then used by the computer when browsing music. The digital album art may then be available for transfer to a portable device and used when browsing music on that device.
However, cover images tend to be limited to the most popular media items. In a growing number of cases, media items may not have accompanying cover images, or such cover images may not be readily available. As a result, when the user adds the media item to her library, there is no corresponding cover image to present to the user. It would be useful to remedy this situation so that the consumer experience is not lessened when encountering such media items.